How to Write a Movie About Your Life

How to make a movie about your life The biggest hazard of identifying yourself as a screenwriter, is people start offering you rights to their life stories, for a fee of course. As if a screenwriter has money for rights… Psha… LOL. Here are the top 5 things not to do when making a story […]

Intention w Ben Von Wong

If you’ve never heard of Ben Wong, you’re missing out. He’s made some of the most iconic images not on the silver screen. He’s a very cinematic photographer. On top of that, he’s done a Ted talk, he’s raised money to save people’s lives. Besides being super talented, he seems pretty grounded and down to earth.

Time is NOT on your side

I got a problem with Social Media. It’s designed to eat your time. This post was inspired by a book I’ve heard about recently called Hooked: How to build habit forming products by Nir Eyaol. There’s a deeper discussion on a podcast you can find here. (45 minutes) How is this relevant to the creative […]

Your Product is You!

That’s right, you are the product. You’re not a PC, you are Apple. People go to find a laptop that has the ram, the connection ports and the touch screen/ fold-y tablet thingy they want. Or they get the cheapest thing they can find. (OK, people don’t really buy laptops any more, that market is […]

The biggest hazard of identifying yourself as a screenwriter, is people start offering you rights to their life stories, for a fee of course. As if a screenwriter has money for rights… Psha… LOL. Here are the top 5 things not to do when making a story about someone’s life. Even if it’s yours. I followed all these principles making my film, Donovan Quixote, and people say it’s pretty good.

If you’ve never heard of Ben Wong, you’re missing out. He’s made some of the most iconic images not on the silver screen. He’s a very cinematic photographer. On top of that, he’s done a Ted talk, he’s raised money to save people’s lives. Besides being super talented, he seems pretty grounded and down to earth. Read more »

How is this relevant to the creative / filmmaker? A) Social media can eat up your time. Especially if you have a family and a day job, your creative time is precious. B) Social media is junk food. C) Stories and characters come from real life D) Boredom is the creative well.

That’s right, you are the product. You’re not a PC, you are Apple. People go to find a laptop that has the ram, the connection ports and the touch screen/ fold-y tablet thingy they want. Or they get the cheapest thing they can find. (OK, people don’t really buy laptops any more, that market is in the toilet, but bare with me) People buy Apple products because they know it will be forward thinking. They know it’ll have a cool slick interface, it’ll talk to all their other apple products and other people will think they’re cool and have a couple extra bucks. You don’t wanna be HP slinging the same laptops Dell and Sony sell in different colors. You wanna be Apple. So what about your films? Read more »

Imagine all of your film work disappeared one day. Poof. Just gone. Doesnt’ exist. Almost finished with a project? doesn’t matter. Got someone else’s footage that they spent more than your personal net value on? Poof. Technical problems will happen. Here are 5 steps to not losing it all, cause one day, you’re going to lose something.

So I heard this on the podcast this week on Jason Blum and Blumhouse Productions, and had to post. Who is Blumhouse? They made little movies like Get Out, Wiplash, Split, The Visit, Sinister, Purge Series and Insidious series, Paranormal Activity series and more.

Jason Blum is the ‘cheapest’ movie producer, and boasts the highest return on investment in hollywood. Get out cost $4.5 million and as of this post has made $150 million in profits. If you’re interested in making a low budget movie, Jason Blum is your patron saint.

The hardest lesson I learned with my first film, Donovan Quixote, was not to put it out there too soon. I put it out there too soon. Big mistake. This was a result of me approaching my first feature like a series of sprints, instead of a marathon.